TRIPLE SONNET FOR LEAVING MY COUNTRY OF BIRTH, BY RACHAEL LIN WHEELER |
after Dorothy Chan Night, and every shadow ruptures—folds into the corners of the darkest garden. In times like this, I think of how a rabbit’s birth is called a kindling. Brief, the light: unwound then coiled. Let it strike each paw print in the empty field of snow. The mother’s scent: a predatory call her daughters will be killed by—if not left behind. And yet, these young, alone, are born both deaf and blind. Crepuscular, the vanish -ing point. The doe: an imprint of her newborn’s slow-burn cry—which is to say, my mouth lies full of tinder. Grief as burnt ash kissing a palm meant for holding nothing. * Palmar’s reflex—a desire to hold—means nothing more than womb-song emptied of its hum. I am nothing more than moon vine climbing skyward like a prayer for every pyre moments before its ignition. Mother, an echo. Mother, the matchsticks. Let her be the shadow of my name, forgotten in the wasteland. I’ve seen it before: even flames of candles, dependent on their wicks, attempt to run from their origin, despite. How else can they survive? I do not want to kill the ghosts roving through the valleys of her distant body—blood so similar to mine—that I, splintered, have never met. * A mine will splinter what it meets: will halve a bed of animal bones beneath the earth, their dead flesh burning waxen in the dirt. Above, the flower carcasses, un- blooming. Upturned garden buried by the snow and wreckage. To loose an early memory from its own grave’s a gentle gift. A haunting. A touch. I’ll detonate. I’ll excavate each scrap of the remains. O, rusted mirror, window turned opaque. The woman’s ghost, my own. I want to fist each absence from its husk. To learn the texture of her voice, of resurrection. From my mouth, language ruptures and I fold into this night— |
Rachael Lin Wheeler will attend Washington University in St. Louis as a Howard Nemerov Writing Scholar and is a 2021 Adroit Journal Summer mentee. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Ghost City Review, Hominum Journal, Plum Recruit Mag, FERAL: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and SOFTBLOW, and others. Serving as the editorial assistant for EX/POST MAGAZINE, Rachael Lin is also the founder and editor of Vox Viola Literary Magazine. She can be found on Twitter @rachaellin_ or at rachaellinwheeler.com.